MYTOPIA Project
- Designer Jen Robbie
From exploring the uncomfortable realities of factory farming through the lens of speciesism, the project aims to evoke an emotional reaction and stimulate intellectual discussion surrounding the ethics of speciesism in the hope of encouraging the target market to reflect on their own attitudes towards farmed species.
Ultimately, the project aims to change the perception of the target audience in consideration of the way food is produced, and to encourage a change of behaviour by reducing animal products and trying more plant-based to reduce impact on the environment, animal suffering and zoonotic disease transmission.
228 x 200mm, 35pp, screw-post bound, GF Smith stock.
Zoonotic diseases have quadrupled in the past 50 years. We are currently living in a historic era of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet our relationship with animals remains unexamined by both the government and general public. Our diets remain largely unchanged, and our myopic perception of the food system is having adverse effects on both the environment and is increasing the chance of disease transmission and future pandemics.
It can be easier to point to cultural differences such as the Chinese wet markets as the sole cause of zoonotic disease transmission than to examine our own hypocrisy in the comparably damaging way we are farming animals in the UK. The pandemic has shown us that overcrowded, unsanitary environments are breeding grounds for disease transmission, yet two thirds of animals are intensively farmed in such conditions.
Why is the ‘maximum output for minimum cost’ model of factory farms—with the associated exploitation and mutilation livestock—culturally accepted as ‘normal’ within our society, when treating other species in the same way would land you in jail for animal abuse?
